Aaron Su

AARON SU, then a graduate student at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, received funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Emplacing Planetary Health: Decolonizing Smart Technologies with Traditional Chinese and Indigenous Knowledges in Taiwan,” supervised by Dr. João Guilherme Biehl. In pushing for Indigenous historical justice over the past decade, Taiwan has expended millions of dollars to reduce economic inequalities as well as what was formerly an alarming 10-year gap in life expectancy for its Indigenous populations. These policies have centered on new programs of technological inclusion under a “participatory design” paradigm. At newly established Cultural Health Stations throughout the country, Indigenous groups are being recruited to manufacture new medical technologies that incorporate traditional knowledge systems; meanwhile, at local Agricultural Research Departments, new environmental technologies aim to improve Indigenous wild crop yields and boost economic outputs in rural areas. What are the possibilities and limits of these programs in rectifying the afterlives of Indigenous dispossession? Through 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the project analyzes how Indigenous communities engage, refuse, and transform these practices of technological inclusion. It follows how local communities contest the “participation” paradigm, manipulating these policies to assert the importance of other factors — like language revitalization and political transformation — in the production of Indigenous futurity. The grantee then explores the implications of such different liberatory models in Taiwan and global Indigenous studies.